The Scariest Scene in The Silence of the Lambs

Every Wednesday we show you a great scene from film history you may remember, you may not — and then we break it down for you.

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It's not easy to forget how creepy Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs is. But it's easy to forget how varied it is in its creepiness: the slithering Hannibal Lecter; the convict flicking his semen at Jodie Foster; even the fog simmering through the woods surrounding FBI HQ in the film's opening. It's all so perfectly unsettling.

It all pales in comparison to the film's creepiest touch, Ted Levine's serial killer Buffalo Bill. Though the plot to murder women in order to fashion a "skin suit" was partly based on the M.O. of Ed Gein, Buffalo Bill's sheer strangeness outstrips that of any serial killer shaken out of real-life crime dossiers. He's never weirder than in the scene near the film's end in which — head tucked into a long blonde wig, genitals drawn through his legs, lipstick carefully applied — he dances (or sort of quaveringly shimmies) to "Goodbye Horses" by one-hit wonder Q Lazarus, while muttering, "Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me."

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The Silence of the Lambs drew criticism at the time for portraying Bill's transvestism as a form of psychopathy. Yet this weird conservative streak is precisely what makes the character, and the film, so unnerving. From the aristocratic Dracula sucking the blood of the nouveau riche to the Oedipal archetype of Psycho's Norman Bates to the stock-and-chop killers slaughtering sexually promiscuous teens in the '80s slasher cycle, most horror films offer what are essentially regressive fantasies. It's the viewer's confrontation with such nasty politics that often works to shake them up more than violence and splatter. In Buffalo Bill's weird cross-dressed dance scene, Jonathan Demme pushes Lambs fully into the domain of horror, ensuring that his film would be remembered as one of the scariest films of all time, not just as a competent and chilling cat-and-mouse procedural.